Overview of Dynamics 365 for Sales October ’18 release – Part 1

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales enables digital transformation by delivering productivity at scale and AI-driven analytics, and by modernizing the sales team collaboration through better-together integration across the Microsoft ecosystem.

The broad expansion to the sales suite allows organizations to modernize and extend their sales processes and applications with meaningful data at the core.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales strives to be the most significant sales insights and productivity application suite on the solution stack of any type and size of sales organization. By combining crucial business data about sellers, buyers, products, organizations, and relationships that previously lived on disconnected data silos in CRM systems, social graphs, and email systems, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales helps organizations empower information workers to make intelligent decisions and be more productive.

Summary of what’s new in Sales

This section lists the features planned for release between October 2018 and March 2019 in the Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 AI for Sales apps.

D365 for Sales

Empower sellers with Playbooks guided by event-driven sales activities

Dynamics 365 for Sales is introducing Playbooks, a new capability to help organizations automate repeatable sales activities and respond to external events.

In the age of the customer, buyers have the upper hand in the relationship with sellers. With nearly limitless access to information, they can dictate their own customer journeys, rather than follow a predefined business process. It is thus important to move from a reactive process-driven data repository on systems of record to proactive and predictive event-driven guidance engines that can suggest next best actions and surface relevant sales activities to successfully respond to external events.

One possible real-world application of Playbooks is the following scenario: If a decision maker and top champion of the product leaves the organization in the middle of a deal, this can become an event with the potential to jeopardize the entire commercial transaction. With Playbooks, however, automation can trigger a play that creates a set of tasks and activities needed to remedy the situation. A task to reach out to current contacts at the customer account and identify the new stakeholder could be immediately followed by an introductory phone call to better understand the new stakeholder’s priorities. This carefully crafted orchestration of activities ensures that the new decision maker is successfully identified and turned into a new champion for the product so that the deal can be salvaged.

The new capabilities will allow organizations to:

• Configure Playbooks and define the set of tasks and activities to automate once triggered.
• Search and launch Playbooks for a particular scenario.

Track the status progress of running Playbooks against their outcome, successful or not.

To be Continued….